Sanford Pinsker is Shadek Professor of Humanities at Franklin and Marshall College and editor of Academic Questions, a publication of the National Association of Scholars.

Low-brow TV shows can still be great art, in the view of Robert J. Thompson, the 38-year-old director of Syracuse University’s newly minted Center for the Study of Popular Television—that is, if one gives up the elitist business of insisting that some things are better than others. Housed within the prestigious Newhouse School of Public Communication, TV Studies will now enjoy generous funding and enormous clout. Those whose hearts beat faster whenever they hear the all-purpose adjective "cutting-edge" are positively giddy. As David Rubin, dean of the Newhouse School, puts it, the new endeavor will "study television entertainment programs with the same care and passion as musicologists study Mozart and Ellington, or professors of English study Melville or Pynchon."

Not surprisingly, Mr. Thompson waxes positively eloquent when he talks about the good that serious study of programs such as Gilligan’s Island or My Mother the Car will do in terms of bucking up critical thinking skills. Better, far better, he argues, to get undergraduates where they are—namely, on the couch watching the tube—than to force them to plod through what those long in the tooth call "classics." Besides, a certain amount of foot-dragging always accompanies any candidate for academic study, whether it be jazz or film, modern novels or even American literature. True, all true—just as it is true that Shakespeare competed with bear-baiting for the entertainment dollars spent in Renaissance England.

But what enthusiasts for the study of popular culture leave out is everything that makes liberal education worth the trouble and ever-rising costs. To concentrate on the vagaries that swirl around us is to become their captive, and this remains true even for those who learn how to write ingenious papers about Hogan’s Heroes. Rather than exercises in dumbing down, what our undergraduates desperately need is an education that challenges, that stretches, and most of all, that liberates them from the tyranny of the near-at-hand.

Does that mean I’m willing to dismiss television itself with a wave of the hand? Hardly. Television is a powerful medium. But if I had to choose between having students listen to Prof. Thompson lecture about the nuances in I Love Lucy or having them read George Orwell, I think I know where they’d get a better sense of how seductive and how ultimately dangerous television can be. And I know that I know where the best chances to end up as a life-time learner lie.

If we were talking about an isolated course, one elective among many, there would be little worth saying. Puff balls come with the elective territory, as do the interesting and solidly first-rate. What matters is the core of a liberal arts education, and that is no longer as secure as it once was. Small wonder that students are stumped when a piece of literature has the audacity to contain a cultural allusion; and even smaller wonder that some conclude that the best solution is to give such people what they can easily digest. That, of course, is to throw in the towel and turn on the set. Our undergraduates deserve better, not only in their college courses, but in the larger world where majoring in Mr. Ed will be seen as the thin goods it surely is.